


Taunting Melodies

by Heroicagalmuse



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Slow Build, Sole Survivor named Lucille, Spoilers for Main Story, Spoilers for Nick's backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-13
Updated: 2017-04-13
Packaged: 2018-10-18 11:44:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10616232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heroicagalmuse/pseuds/Heroicagalmuse
Summary: Valentine always thought that his partner just didn't like the tune. He never understood her animosity towards it, but it was just a quirk he had come to accept. In the wake of her visit to the Institute, he comes to understand that quirk a bit more and reminds her that she isn't as alone in the Wasteland as she thinks.





	

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is my first story for Fallout 4 and it is more of a character piece than anything. I just noticed how much of a punch to the gut the lyrics of the song by the Inkspots "It's all over but the crying" was when I compared the way the Sole Survivor must be feeling about everything and it sort of evolved into this.  
> SPOILER WARNING FOR MAIN QUEST (even though pretty much everyone knows the plot twist of this game by now).

The last thing anybody expected was for Lucille to shoot the radio. It was like flipping a switch; they’d been discussing their latest battle plan to take down the Institute in their home base of Sanctuary Hills when the familiar melody had started to play from the corner.

  
“It's all over but the crying…” The song had been cut short with a final sounding shot that came nonchalantly from her pistol, and she carried on with the meeting after a moment of awkward silence among her assembled friends and allies.

  
Piper just stared in shock at the smoking radio while Preston’s anxious look of concern flickered from the General to the destroyed circuitry. Danse had nearly jumped out of his skin, and Deacon was giving Lucille a look that screamed he thought she was off her rocker. Codsworth had clucked momentarily about the mess but eventually let it go, and Cait and MacCready had shared a glance of confusion but just shrugged it off. Dogmeat whimpered at the sound and huddled by his mistress’ feet in irritated response to the echo of the gunshot. No doubt if Strong had bothered to come to the meeting, he would’ve voiced his confusion to her waste off ammo or hostility towards the innocuous electronic. Only Hancock and Nick had shared a knowing glance as Lucille had marched on with her instructions and reports about the going-ons of the Institute and the ideas to keep raiders off the backs of the numerous settlements they had taken under their wings.

  
Ever since Lucille had stormed her way into that vault and pulled quite the interesting rescue, Nick had been learning the idiosyncrasies and strengths of his partner. And she had become that, his partner. He had been with her through it all: from fending off the dangers of the Commonwealth, to hunting down and killing Kellogg for his part in her family’s tragedy, Nick had been there to watch her back. At first it was to repay a debt and help a desperate mother reunite with her son, but over time it had grown into a close friendship and partnership that he cherished deeply. It was one of the only things he could truly call his own. The agency, the detective get-up, even his habit of smoking and his taste in alcohol was a byproduct of the man who he had stolen the memories of. Lucille though, what she and he had done, that was all his: Nick Valentine, synth detective and stalwart partner of the Sole Survivor of Vault 111. And as such, he knew that she had a strange dislike of that song.

  
Any time it was on the radio, she’d turn it off or strike up a conversation to avoid hearing it. Valentine had chalked it up to being a pet peeve, but over time had come to think that there might be more to the story. That little display of aggression? That right there confirmed his suspicions. After the meeting she dismissed everyone tersely and walked out of the room, leaving them stupefied to her brusque exit. A moment passed and eventually Preston piped up that they should all get busy with their assigned tasks and roles, to which the others had, after a moment of contemplation, assented to and decided it was best to give Lucille her space. She had been through a lot in the past few days, what with being the only one known to infiltrate the Institute and come back in one piece. Then she’d thrown herself into her work with the Minutemen and Railroad, speaking only in snippets about what she’d learned. Nick knew she’d tell them when she was ready, but it didn’t stop him from worrying about what was gnawing at his partner.  
All she’d said was that Shaun was alive and the Institute had plans for her too. When the others had tried to press for information, she had shut down further lines of inquiry and insisted that they focus on the problems right in front of them for the moment. For the moment that was a good plan, but sooner or later the weight of what she was carrying would get to her and Nick had a feeling that busted radio was a sure sign that it already had.

  
“Nicky, let’s talk.” Hancock had said once the others had filed out of the conference space that Lucille had set up. Nick took his hand off the knob of the door to the outside settlement and turned to face the Mayor of Goodneighbor while casually leaning against the door to prevent others from coming in and interrupting their talk. “I think you and I both know that Luce ain’t doin’ so good.” Hancock nodded toward the wrecked music player and Nick inclined his head in agreement. “Ever since that whole business with the Institute, she just hasn’t been Little Miss Sunshine anymore and to be honest, it’s puttin’ me off to see that cold, dead look in her eye.”

  
Nick had noticed something off about her look as well. Eyes usually so full of compassion and eagerness to get to business and help anyone she could was gone almost entirely gone. A spark of innocence and excitement at the prospect of doing good in the messed up world she had stepped into after leaving the Vault was extinguished and replaced with a lingering sense of despair and disappointment.

  
“Yeah, I get ya John.” Valentine raised a hand to stop his tangent. Hancock shrugged.

  
“Look, someone’s gotta talk to her about it and I think we both know who she’d want it to be.” A pointed look from the mayor did not go unnoticed.  
“And you think it should be me.” It wasn’t a question, it was a statement.

  
“C’mon Nick, you and I both know that the only one who can get that woman to open up is you. You’ve been practically inseparable since I first laid eyes on the pair of ya in Goodneighbor. And besides, I don’t think you’d approve of my method of cheering her up.” He tapped the pocket of his coat where he kept his stash. “I’ve always found that Med-X is good for mellowing someone out, looks like Luce could do with some.”

  
“John, you know she hates chems.” Nick crossed his arms and narrowed his eyes at his friend. Being a lawyer before the war meant that she had been around when the so called “war on chems” was still alive and kicking, and it was something she and Nick agreed on due to a shared recollection of friends and acquaintances who had been hooked. Lucille didn’t agree with Hancock’s habits but she had decided to curb her tongue for the sake of their friendship and knowing a lost cause when she saw one. Besides, with added constitution that ghouls had for all sorts of nasty substances, she struggled to find a way to effectively argue about their detriments to the mayor of Goodneighbor. Simply put, they had agreed to disagree and leave it at that.

  
Hancock gave a roguish grin that meant he knew he had succeeded in convincing the synth detective to go and inquire with his partner.

  
“Then get to it Nicky. It’s either your way or my way, take your pick.” Nick’s response was stepping out the door after collecting his trench coat and walking off down the streets towards Lucille’s place. She had claimed a house across the way from her former home, saying that her original home held too many memories. It was an unspoken rule that no one else was ever to make use of the structure either once they started to settle there out of respect for the heralded Sole Survivor had gone through, so it was usually eerily quiet and dark. As Nick passed it this time, however, he saw that that wasn’t the case. On occasion when she was overwhelmed, Lucille would retreat to her prewar home, the need for familiarity and comfort outweighing the painful memories. It looked like this was one of those times.

  
He paused for a moment when he came to the door. Lucille had indicated the house only once to him in a moment of fond memory and that had been that. Nick had never passed over the threshold out of reverence to a past that she held dear. It felt almost like sacrilege to be doing this, going into the place that once had been the happy home of her husband Nate and her missing son Shaun. However, as much as he loathed to admit it, Hancock was right and Lucille needed someone to talk to right around now and Nick really would prefer it be words over chems. Bracing himself, he gently knocked on the door in expectation of being sent away. There was silence for a moment before Lucille called out to him.

  
“Come in.” Her voice was hoarse and rough like it had been put through considerable strain, but Nick came in all the same. Upon entering it was almost surreal. While most houses had been destroyed and decayed beyond recognition over the past two hundred years, the general structure of Lucille’s residence had been preserved in a semblance of prewar life. Nick’s own borrowed memories flashed before his eyes of a happy home that the original Valentine had always dreamed of having with Jenny and the regret that would flare every time he considered his past life’s fiancé. Lucille wasn’t the only one who had to combat ghosts.

  
He heard a rustling down the hall and made his way tentatively over the scarred wood and some of the clutter that had accumulated on the floor over the years. There was a master bedroom to the left and a nursery on the right and Nick knew where he’d find his partner.

  
As he stood in the doorway and surveyed the room, Lucille looked up from spot on the ground. Her knees were curled up to her chest, her arms hugging them to her as she sat beside a crib with a tattered mobile and held a scuffed rocket that looked like it belonged to said mobile in one of her hands.

  
“Hey Valentine.” She acknowledged his presence, her gaze drifting from him to the peeling blue paint on the wall beside the door. Valentine didn’t say anything but made his way over to her and slid down the wall to sit beside her. “Come to check up on me?”

  
“I was just wondering if you’d suddenly grown homicidal urges towards all the tech in the Common Wealth. If so, I think Danse should get a head start on warning his friends in the Brotherhood.” Lucille scoffed slightly at his joke, but it wasn’t nearly as lighthearted as it normally was. In fact, it was a bit tired.

  
“The radio had it coming. I hate that song. Don’t you?” She lazily turned her head towards Nick and he was shocked to see the glistening of tears in her eyes.  
“Well, it’s a bit melancholy but I don’t seem to have quite the same amount of animosity for it as you do.” Lucille shrugged dully as her shoulders drooped at Nick’s response of not understanding. “Any particular reason you’ve got beef with it?”

  
“The lyrics, Valentine. I hate those lyrics.” And like a taunt from the universe the radio that was over in the master bedroom started in on that hated melody. Valentine had heard the song over and over again for years on end since coming to Diamond City, but for the first time he really listened.

  
_“It's all over but the crying_  
_And nobody's crying but me_  
_Friends all over know I'm trying_  
_To forget about how much I care for you”_

  
Lucille clenched the small red rocket that had fallen off the mobile and shut her eyes against the song and suddenly it started to click with her partner. The reason she was here in this place, the rocket that she was holding onto as a lifeline.

  
_“Poor little dreams that keep trying to come true_  
_It's all over but the crying_  
_And I can't get over crying over you”_

  
The song, like this house, was a reminder of what she had lost. In an instant everything she had known had been ended in a deadly flash of a radioactive mushroom cloud. First her home town, then her family as her husband was slaughtered by the Institute, and then her infant wrenched from her husband’s corpse. Even worse, their last lead had suggested that he wasn’t even an infant anymore, but closer to ten years old. She had missed his first steps, his first words, half of his childhood all in an instant as she was entombed for another decade after watching her family be ripped apart in front of her. The dreams, the hopes she had once had were all but dashed besides what good she could cobble out of this strange and deadly new world she found herself in. It would never be able to go back to what it once was, and all that was left was her struggle of trying to forget what she had once had and what she lost as she forged a new identity in the Commonwealth.

  
The thing was, if anyone was going to be able to understand what that was like, it was Nick Valentine the synth detective. With a head full of stolen memories, and a personality wrenched from a dead man’s mind two centuries ago, they were both relics of the past living in an unforgiving present that they had no say in arriving at. The dreams he had, Nick wasn’t sure if they were his own or the other Nick Valentine’s. His memories of family and love and life before the war were all falsehoods given to him to establish a baseline instead of complete tabula rasa so that a machine who thought he was a man wouldn’t short-circuit. Oh, if anyone understood was cable of understanding the pangs that this song could bring to Lucille, it would be Nick Valentine.

  
Standing up brusquely Lucille walked to the master bedroom and slammed the off button on the radio as the chorus started to pick up into a more jovial repetition of the lines before. Nick followed closely behind as she sat on the bed and placed her head in her hands. Deciding it was prudent not to leave her feeling more isolated than necessary, he went forward and sat down next to her, placing his arm on her shoulder.

  
“I understand, Lucy.” He said after a moment of silent heaves from his stalwart partner. Lucy was the nickname he had tagged her with in a moment of endearment at the successful closing of a case. She had taken a liking to it and from then on in the most private of moments, he would pull out the nickname to remind her that he had her back. She looked up at him and he was shocked to see the tears falling from her eyes. The one thing Lucille never did was let anyone see her break. She refused to let the Wasteland chip away at her, wear her down, and so he had hardly ever seen her with anything more than slightly watery eyes. She always beat back her emotions and put on a strong front, but this was a moment of raw honesty.

  
“It’s Shaun, Nick. I found Shaun. That’s what I haven’t been telling you, anyone. The Institute didn’t just take him, they raised him. He’s in his sixties. It wasn’t an extra decade I was under, it was sixty years.” Valentine didn’t have a response, so he sat there and let his partner unload the burden she had been carrying while shouldering the troubles of everyone else. “He’s gone Nick. The boogeyman, the monster of the Commonwealth is my son Shaun.” Then the silent shaking was vocalized in harsh intakes of breath as they turned into sobs as the dam broke. Nick let her lean against his shoulder and let it all out. After a few minutes of thick silence, she turned to him in embarrassment.  
“I’m sorry. I didn’t—you shouldn’t be seeing me like this.” She got up to pretend that it didn’t happen but he gently grabbed her arm before she could get past him and out the door.

  
“Lucy,” He started in a reprimanding voice. “Being human doesn’t make you weak, it’s what makes you different than the rest of the folks out here who can’t be bothered to care anymore.” She blushed a bit at the reprimand but nodded all the same. “Now c’mon, John’s waiting for us.” At that she smiled a bit, noting the concern of her two best friends. “He said he had some Med-X for ya if you’re still feeling down.” She scrunched her nose and shook her head.

  
“I think I’ll save that for the next time I have a hole in my leg, thanks.” With Valentine’s arm around her shoulder the two walked out of the house to face the Commonwealth again, as a team. The road ahead would be much more difficult than either of them could’ve imagined with twists and turns that were bound to be just as unpleasant as the beginning of their tale, but as long as they had each other’s backs, they could make it through.

  
The past was all over, it was true, so it was time to start working for the future because now, that was all the two out of time had.


End file.
